10 fantastic quotes about UNlearning

Over Christmas I spent some time trawling the interweb for interesting blogs, thoughts and ideas and I came across these.

I really love the idea of unlearning that which isn’t useful any more or is unsupported or is no longer relevent in todays world.

Ally and I have already posted some “debunking” posts and I guess these are all part of unlearning.

I just find it interesting that we don’t really focus on unlearning as much as perhaps we should.

Anyway here are the top 10 quotes I found for unlearning. My apologies for not attributing these. After a couple of sherries I forgot where they came from. Stop press: I got them from the Unlearning 101 blog by Jack Uldrich, thanks Jack)

1. “The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.” Alvin Toffler

2. “The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds.” President John F. Kennedy
   

3. “In a time of drastic change, it is the unlearners who inherit the future. The learned find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists”. Eric Hoffer

4. “In some sense our ability to open the future will depend not on how well we learn anymore but on how well we are able to unlearn”. Alan Kay
   
   
5. “Two things seemed pretty apparent to me. One was that in order to be a pilot a man had to learn more than any one man ought to learn; and the other was that he must learn it all over again in a different way every 24 hours.” Mark Twain
   

6. “Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out.” Thomas Cardinal Wolsey
   
   
7. “The most important lessons lay not in what I needed to learn, but in what I first needed to unlearn.” Jim Collins
   
   
8. “Strange about learning; the farther I go the more I see that I never knew even existed. A short while ago I foolishly thought I could learn everything–all the knowledge in the world. Now I hope only to be able to know of its existence, and to understand one grain of it.” Charly in Flowers for Algernon
   
   
9. “The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.” Antisthenes
   
   
10. “The difficulty lies, not in new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of have been, into the corners of our minds.” John Maynard Keynes

undo image by  dps
Find out about Jack Uldrich on Amazon

Paul and Ally are working on an exciting 6-part (online) course to help your learners fully engage with your training - sign up for the 'early bird' list for advanced notification and more info

If you liked this, you may also like these:

1. Why is it hard to “unlearn” an incorrect fact? Although this article focuses on ‘unlearning’ facts, could we use the same techniques to unlearn poor...
2. What Nonprofits Teach Us About Learning Really interesting article examining lessons the commercial world can learn from the not-for-profit sector: The recession...
3. Do you want to boost recall by up to 15% This seems to indicate is that by doing all our training in training rooms we are depriving...
4. Dale’s Cone of Learning figures debunked Edgar Dale was a US educationist and professor of educations at Ohio State University. In 1946 he...
5. When the brain goes “off piste” Richard Potts is director of the Human Origins Programme at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural...